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Interview with Gerard Russell on Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms

Interview with Gerard Russell on Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms 

Ex: http://www.onreligion.co.uk

Former British diplomat, Gerard Russell, has published a work looking at the minority religions in the Middle-East.

Abdul-Azim Ahmed speaks to him.

AA: Thank you Gerard for speaking to us about your book. Could you begin by telling us a bit about yourself?

GR: Sure. I’m a former British diplomat. I’ve been in the Middle East for many years and I learned Arabic. I’ve lived in Cairo, Jerusalem, Baghdad, Jeddah, and Kabul. In each of these places I had encountered these little religions, little communities, which when I looked at them, seemed to have preserved remarkably intact elements of much earlier trends and traditions of human thought. You see these communities, you think ‘this is amazing, this is history alive in the present day!’

AA: Can you tell me more about the religions you looked at, and where they come from geographically?

GR: I looked mainly at the places where I had lived and where I could say something that others perhaps couldn’t. So in Egypt I looked at the Copts, likewise Palestine for the Samaritans – Palestine-Israel I should say particularly as they are the original Israelites. I looked at Lebanon for the Druze, Iraq for the Yazidis and Mandaeans, Iran for the Zoroastrians and also I looked at Pakistan for an outlier group which is very different from the others, which is the Kalasha who live in Chitral in Pakistan.

AA: There was a very gruesome and unfortunate way in which the topic you look at gripped the headlines. In the summer of 2014, the self-styled Islamic State besieged a community of Yazidis in Iraq, and many were asking the question ‘who are the Yazidis?’ Naturally you were well placed to answer.

GR: That’s right. It’s not the first time that the Yazidis have been exposed to this kind of horror. In 2007 there was a massive terrorist attack which killed over 700 of them in Sinjar. So there is something of a history of this. Although it is important to remember that between the Ottomans (who as late as 1880s were behaving abominably to the Yazidis) and the al-Qaida attack in 2007, there was actually a prolonged period of mutual coexistence and inclusion. Egypt 1860 to 1920 is also a good example. There is a very clear trend in those times in which people of all religions in the Middle-East behaved to each other more decently than was sometimes the case in Europe during that era. That is important to remember because the narrative says ‘Muslims are uniquely intolerant’ which simply isn’t true; the reality is that the Middle-East was ahead of Europe in including its Christian and Jewish minorities for many years. The fact that it appears so negative now by comparison, is a product of particular circumstances – it is not inevitable at all!

AA: From that contemporary context, it is interesting to look at the roots as you mentioned. For myself, I find the Mandaeans and Yazidis especially intriguing, because they seem to echo a familiar theology of the three Abrahamic faiths, but have stark differences also. How was your experience of this?

GR: One thing that is interesting about the Mandaeans is that they recognise certain Jewish prophets such as Noah, but not Abraham. So you might think that is peculiar, because Abraham is the patriarch, but in fact they have this in common with many religions of two millennia ago. To the ascetics of the Middle-East, those who wanted a strict morality, they read about Abraham and they weren’t very impressed. The Mandaean rejection of Abraham is interesting because it connects us to that historic era, which is when the Mandaean religion was conceived.

The Mandaeans have an almost impenetrable demonology and cosmology written in their language, which is Babylonian Aramaic. Some of their rituals are thought provoking, such as the tradition of the priest staying awake for seven days and seven nights without eating to become ordained. Likewise, to become a bishop, you have an amazing ceremony where a message is sent to ‘other side’ through a dying person, to gain permission for this particular person’s appointment. Fascinating ideas. Sometimes when I read about these, it really makes me reflect and not just as ‘wow, this is really old’ but ‘wow, this is an interesting concept’. The Yazidis’ belief in Melek Taus is one such thing.

AA: Well maybe that is a point to pick up on. There is a certain familiarity, certainly for Muslims, with the cosmology of the creation of Adam and Eve, of the angels, of the role of Satan. But of course the Yazidis have a much more idiosyncratic understanding of Melek Taus who is associated with the fallen Archangel Iblis. Could you elaborate a bit more on that? It is an almost subversive take on traditional Quranic readings.

GR: Yes, it really is, when you look at certain aspects of Yazidi belief. For example, Melek Taus – he appears to be the Archangel Azazel, or Lucifer, or Iblis as he is called in Islam. The Yazidis use the term Iblis, but not Shaitaan which they see as insulting and in fact it is a taboo.

The Yazidis, like Muslims, believe Iblis rebelled against God, but unlike Muslims, Yazidis believe he was forgiven. That said, if you look back to the ninth century, there were a lot of Sufi movements that explored the idea of Satan in a way that wasn’t entirely hostile. The Islamic saint Rabia al-Basra said she wanted to quench hell, to extinguish the fires of hell, so that none would be good out of fear of punishment. The Yazidis actually say that the fires of hell have been quenched by the tears of Melek Taus’. It is in one sense a radical departure from the Islamic tradition, but in another sense, it is not a million miles away from what some Muslims have sometimes believed.

AA: That similarity, outwardly at least, is comparable to the Samaritans and the Jewish religion. Many people will be familiar with the story of the Good Samaritan, but unaware of the history of the people and their religion.

GR: The Samaritans have a great advocate who travels the world called Benny Tsedaka. They are interesting as they are both Palestinian and Israeli by nationality and politically – this is unique. Although to the outside world they look simply Jewish, it is much complex than that. The word Jewish comes from Judea and the tribe of Judah. The Samaritans are the descendants of a different people from the Northern Kingdom of Israel, supposedly wiped out by the Assyrians in the seventh century BCE. So they see themselves as being a separate people. They are not accepted by traditional Jewish Rabbis who do not regard them as ‘kosher’, as being part of the people of Israel.

The thing that really distinguishes them from Judaism is that whereas the Jews were scattered by the Romans, the Samaritans were largely left alone. It seemed like a blessing to them at the time. Interestingly though, the consequence is that now they almost don’t exist. They never really adjusted to living in diaspora. They have kept the old traditions exactly as they were. They still have a priestly caste, they still have sacrifices, and they keep The Law incredibly strictly. They almost became extinct as there were fewer than 30 of them at one point whereas there are now 771. So they have shown an amazing resilience.

One thing to remember about these religions is that people have predicted their extinction many times before, but they have been proven wrong, they have remarkable resilience. People in the 1840s saying the Druze will no longer have Chiefdoms in Lebanon, well they do. They said in the 1880s the Samaritans won’t last much longer, well they did. Politics changes – the mood can be hostile one year and then ten years later it may not be.

AA: That is a sobering thought, but positive too. That these religions may be more permanent than the transient politics of the region, and may outlive these contemporary catastrophes we see. Moving away from the Levant and Iraq to the Kalasha in Pakistan – could you tell us some more about them? They seem like another tradition that has survived despite the odds.

GR: These groups of course survived for many reasons, among them that there is a willingness in Islam for coexistence, or toleration at least, of other religions. But there were often geographical reasons – such them living in marshes or mountains. Often a conquering force would simply resign themselves to not enter a particular piece of land because it was simply too difficult.

In the case of the Kalasha, they lived in the great mountains of the Hindu Kush. There used to be a whole collection of tribes in that region who practiced what we could describe as an antique form of paganism. It really does involve many gods and sacrifices, ceremonies and dance, wine drinking too! They survived for a long time because of the mountains, and even Tamerlane, who was one of the few who did want to go around and convert people by force, couldn’t subdue them.

A few remaining Kalasha live in Chitral on what are now good terms with the local authorities. It has been a mixed history however. You can read some incredibly passionate books in defence of the Kalasha by Pakistani intellectuals. There were some individuals, particularly a local cleric who wanted to convert them in the 1950s, but they have survived.

AA: Taking a step back, there is a question I have which I wonder if you can shed some light on – is there a particular reason why the Middle East has a larger amount of religious diversity than Europe?

GR: That is a great question. There are a few reasons. One is that it has a very deep past. When Christianity and Islam arrived, the Middle East already had other deeply embedded religions which had philosophies which were very sophisticated and therefore more resistant to conversion than the equivalent in Europe.

The second reason is that historically the Arab Muslims who conquered those areas, they had to establish their own authority while having their own distinct religion. So they didn’t put emphasis on conversion, but they wanted acent for their rule. When Christianity came into Europe, it came via the Romans who had already ruled Europe for 300 years, they didn’t need to be as tolerant.

The third thing, which is partly related to that, is that Islam was quite accepting of other religions (I don’t mean to exaggerate – in actual behaviour, it was very similar to the Christianity in Western Europe) but what was unusual about Islam was that it had this greater level of acceptance of other faiths because of the Quran making it explicit these religions were respected, and this respect extended to religions that you might not immediately think about, such as the Mandaeans, also called the Sabians. And so I think it does prove something very important which is that the history of Islam, in particular the history of Islam when it was at its height in terms of culture and technology, when Baghdad was the capital of the world and the leading civilisation, was a history of religious diversity.

AA: Thank you very much for your time Gerard.

Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms by Gerard Russell is available for purchase online and in bookstores.

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Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms – illuminating the plight of the Middle East’s minorities

Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms – illuminating the plight of the Middle East’s minorities

This journey by Gerard Russell into the ‘disappearing religions of the Middle East’ is a fascinating record of the end of tolerance

William Dalrymple

Ex: http://www.theguardian.com

In the spring of 2006, Gerard Russell was a bored British diplomat stewing in the heat of the Green Zone in Baghdad, “a five-mile 21st-century dystopia filled with concrete berms and highway bridges that ended in midair where a bomb had cleaved them”. Then he received a call from the high priest of the Mandeans.

The Mandeans, he knew, claimed descent from Seth, son of Adam, and believed themselves to be the last followers of John the Baptist. They were also said to be the last surviving remnant of the Gnostic sects that once proliferated across the Middle East in late antiquity. In addition, Arab scholars had long recognised them as “the last Babylonians”. It was, writes Russell, “rather like being summoned to meet one of the knights of the Round Table”. He arranged to meet the high priest and his entourage in Al-Rasheed hotel on the edge of the Green Zone.

The encounter had, however, a sad conclusion. The high priest told Russell how the American invasion of Iraq had unleashed a firestorm on his people. The Mandeans had been protected by Saddam Hussein, who saw them as a link to the ancient Babylonian empire that the Ba’athists claimed as the precursor of the modern nation state of Iraq. But during the anarchy after his fall, and the US occupation that followed, life had become impossible. The high priest spoke of the long series of forced conversions, bombings, killings and kidnappings for ransom that had affected his flock since 2002. Now he wanted to transport the entire community to the west: “There are only a few hundred of us left in Iraq,” said the high priest. “And we want to leave. We want your country to give us asylum.”

The slow and still continuing unravelling of the vast multiethnic, multireligious diversity of the Ottoman empire has been the principal political fact of both the Middle East and the Balkans ever since the mid-19th century. Under the capricious thumb of the sultans, the different faiths, tribes and ethnicities of the Ottoman empire had lived, if not in complete harmony, then at least in a kind of pluralist equilibrium: an interwoven patchwork of different communities living separately, yet side by side. But with the Ottoman retreat from the Balkans in the early 19th century, and the eventual collapse of the rest of that empire in the aftermath of the first world war, that patchwork was ripped apart.

Everywhere, pluralism was replaced with a ferocious polarisation. Almost all the former Ottoman lands suffered bouts of savage bloodletting, and some of these – Turkey 1919-21, Palestine 1948, Cyprus 1963-4, Lebanon 1975-90, Bosnia 1991-2, Iraq from 2002 and most recently in Syria from 2011 – grew into civil wars of startling violence and fought along religious faultlines.

In the aftermath of each of these wars, from Sarajevo to Baghdad, in dribs and drabs and occasional tragic exoduses such as occurred with the Yezidis last summer, ethnic and religious minorities have fled to places where they can be part of a majority: the Pontic and Smyrna Greeks to Greece; the Anatolian Armenians to Armenia; the various Jewish communities to Israel – in each case creating religious nationalisms operating in two directions. Those too few for that, such as the Mandeans and Yezidis, have tended to abandon the region altogether, seeking out places less heavy with history, such as North America or Australia. The recent Isis-driven departure of the Yezidis and Chaldean Christians of Mosul is only the latest chapter in a process that began with the secession of Serbia and Greece from Ottoman control in the 19th century, and the subsequent explusion of their Turkish minorities: in 1878, for example, about 130,000 Bosnian Muslims migrated from Sarajevo to areas under Ottoman rule.

Baptism ritual of the Mandeans

Islam has traditionally been tolerant of minorities: the relatively gentle treatment of Christians under Muslim rule contrasts strongly with the fate of Jews and Muslims in, say, 15th-century Spain, forced to flee or convert and even then pursued by the cruelties and tortures of the Inquisition. As Aubry de la Motraye, a 17th-century Huguenot exile escaping religious persecution in Europe, admiringly put it, “there is no country on earth where the exercise of all religions is more free and less subject to being troubled than in Turkey”. The same broad tolerance that gave homes to the Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal also protected the survivors of other religions that preceded Islam: not just Judaism and eastern Christianity, but also Yezidis, Samaritans and Mandeans, as well as relative latecomers such as the Druze and the Alawites.

All this came to an abrupt end after the first world war, and the establishment of a series of ethno-religious Ottoman successor states such as Serbia, Turkey and Israel. Here, citizenship was often conflated with a religious and ethnic identity. In each of these, majoritarianism was the rule, and minorities felt increasingly unloved and unwelcome.

This process has only accelerated in the 21st century, especially in Iraq, Syria and Egypt, where the slow decline of communism and Arab nationalism, “Islamism’s secular competitors”, has taken place in parallel with the rise of fundamentalist Salafi Islam. As Russell observes: “In Egypt, the past 50 years have seen much more violence against the Copts than the previous 50 years had. Iraq, a country ruled in the 1950s by a man of mixed Shi’a-Sunni parentage, is now a maelstrom of communal violence.”

In each case, the situation of the minorities has grown increasingly untenable: the Chaldeans, Mandeans and Yezidis have all had to flee Iraq, the last Armenians have left Syria and the Copts are now haemorrhaging out of Egypt. To the east of Ottoman lands, among the Zoroastrians of Iran and the Kafir Kalash of Afghanistan, there has been a similar process of growing violence culminating in emigration.

There have been good studies of individual parts of the process, but Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms, Russell’s brilliant and constantly engaging account of his travels through the disappearing religions of the Middle East, is the first attempt to pull all these diverse threads together. His descriptions of dogged believers clinging on in their last shrines may be terse compared with the fully drawn pen portraits one gets from Ryszard Kapuściński or Colin Thubron, but where Russell excels is in his ability to link the past and the present, and to draw from a well of historical and theological scholarship, and his deep erudition in Arabic and Farsi, to show why we must take note of these unlikely survivors from the ancient Middle East, why their emigration matters and how this is likely to affect contemporary politics.

The opening Mandean chapter shows the full range of Russell’s strengths. The Mandeans are usually looked on as the last of the Gnostics, yet he convincingly shows that many of their customs and traditions date from many centuries earlier: their scriptures are written “in a language very close to that used by Jewish scholars who compiled the Babylonian Talmud”. Their music and hymns and their avoidance of meat and alcohol, as well as their suspicion of sex, link them to the Manicheans, whose founder, Mani, was born into a Mandean household. Their use of astronomy and some of their spells, which still invoke the goddess Libat or Ishtar, are inheritances from Babylon.

It is a similar case with the Yezidis. They have long been accused by their Muslim and Christian neighbours of being devil worshippers. This is a crude caricature of a much more interesting and complex esoteric theology, whose worship of the peacock angel, Melek Taus, draws on elements of Assyrian and Sumerian religious beliefs and whose bull slaughter is an inheritance from that early competitor of Christianity, Mithraism. At the centre of their belief is their faith that Melek Taus, having rebelled against God, “extinguished the fires of hell with his tears of repentance and was restored to favour as the chief of all the angels”.

The book, which opens with one dystopia, Baghdad, ends with another: the urban wasteland of Detroit, the unlikely destination of many of these exiles. On the way, Russell takes us on a fascinating and timely journey through the beliefs and predicaments of seven fascinating but little-known religions; as well as the Mandeans and Yezidis, we meet the last of the Iranian Zoroastrians, the Druze and Samaritans lodged uneasily between Israel and the Arabs, the increasingly persecuted Coptic Christians of Egypt and the Kafir Kalash of the Hindu Kush. It’s a long time since I read a travel book that taught or illuminated so much, but its importance is greater than that. Tragically, this book puts on record for the last possible time a once-plural world that is on the verge of disappearing for ever.

• William Dalrymple’s Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan is out in paperback.

• To order Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms for £16 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.

La fin programmée des oligarques...

La fin programmée des oligarques...

par Michel Geoffroy

Ex: http://www.polemia.com

Nous reproduisons ci-dessous un point de vue de Michel Geoffroy, cueilli sur Polémia et consacré à l'effondrement prévisible de l'oligarchie, la classe des nantis de la mondialisation...

La fin programmée des oligarques

Aujourd’hui une oligarchie transnationale domine sans partage les post-démocraties occidentales. Mais son règne touche à sa fin.

L’oligarchie, fille de la fin de l’URSS

L’oligarchie s’est imposée dans la seconde moitié du XXe siècle à la suite de l’effondrement de l’URSS et de la disparition de l’hypothèque que le socialisme, d’abord, et le communisme, ensuite, faisaient peser sur le système capitaliste.

L’oligarchie correspond donc dans l’ordre métapolitique au triomphe de la conception du monde du protestantisme anglo-saxon sur tous ses adversaires.

Sur ce plan, le XXe siècle a été le siècle des Anglo-Saxons, celui de leur suprématie. Au point que certains ont cru avoir atteint la fin de l’histoire, avec le triomphe planétaire du libéralisme économique et de la « démocratie » et bientôt un gouvernement mondial sous leur direction.

L’oligarchie bourgeoise : un cocktail de libéralisme et de mai 1968

Dans l’ordre sociologique, l’oligarchie correspond à la bourgeoisie libérée de la peur de la révolution socialiste et qui pour cette raison ne met plus aucun frein à la recherche de son intérêt ni à l’exploitation des autres – mais une bourgeoisie désormais mondialiste et non plus patriote, car la richesse, comme les grandes entreprises, est de nos jours majoritairement transnationale.

Dans l’ordre idéologique, l’oligarchie correspond à l’alliance du libéralisme, de l’esprit libertaire et du cosmopolitisme : un cocktail original qui transcende la vieille opposition droite/gauche puisque la gauche a renoncé à révolutionner le capitalisme. L’esprit libertaire est hérité de la révolution culturelle des années 1960, initiée aux Etats-Unis et qui s’est ensuite répandue dans tout l’Occident.

Mais à la différence des libertaires du XIXe siècle qui ne voulaient « Ni Dieu ni Maître », les libertaires actuels sont au service de la domination sans partage de l’Argent : car ils ont transformé le « Jouissons sans entraves » de mai 1968 en « Consommons sans limites ». Et ils ont ouvert la voie à la marchandisation du monde, comme l’illustre le fait que la promotion de l’homosexualité au rang de normalité débouche sur la GPA, c’est-à-dire la marchandisation de la maternité.

Le règne sans partage des oligarques

Les oligarques règnent en Occident depuis environ 30 années et ils l’ont façonné à leur image et conformément à leurs intérêts.

Les résultats parlent d’eux-mêmes : abolition des frontières, destruction des traditions et des cultures nationales, précarisation générale des salariés, augmentation des inégalités de revenus et de la violence sociale, immigration massive, ahurissement médiatique des populations, réduction des libertés politiques.

En Europe ils ont pris la direction de l’Union européenne pour la transformer en espace de libre-échange inféodé aux Etats-Unis et ils ont ouvert la voie au Grand Remplacement des Européens sur leur propre terre.

Les oligarques se croient tout permis et prétendent désormais régenter le monde entier par le truchement de la superpuissance américaine.

Mais en réalité la situation leur échappe.

Les oligarques ne comprennent pas que le monde change

L’oligarchie incarne la classe des nantis de la mondialisation et promeut donc les « valeurs » des marchands : le contrat et le marché. C’est pourquoi elle perd de plus en plus pied dans un monde marqué par le retour de l’Histoire, de la Foi (islam), de la Violence et du Tragique : c’est-à-dire un monde de plus en plus chaotique que le « doux marché » ne sait pas réguler.

Les oligarques ont oublié que nous ne sommes plus au temps de Thatcher et de Reagan.

Le vide laissé par la disparition de l’URSS est, depuis, en train de se combler par la réémergence des anciennes civilisations (Chine, Inde, Asie notamment) et par le retour à la puissance de la Russie. L’islam s’affirme aussi comme un universalisme concurrent du mondialisme yankee, au surplus plus dynamique que lui au plan démographique.

Il apparaît de plus en plus, en outre, que la domination des Etats-Unis ne sera pas durable : car à la fragilité d’une économie reposant sur l’endettement et la suprématie du dollar (de plus en plus contestée par la Chine notamment) s’ajoute l’éclatement communautaire d’une société multiraciale où l’élément WASP décline irrémédiablement.

Le rêve oligarchique est en train de se briser

L’oligarchie se berce du rêve du contrôle total mais c’est une illusion fatale. Car comme l’écrivait Dominique Venner : « L’histoire est le lieu de l’imprévu ».

Le rêve de l’oligarchie est en train de se briser au XXIe siècle.

D’abord, l’oligarchie n’est qu’un mal européen et nord-américain en réalité : car il découle de la décadence occidentale. L’inversion des valeurs qui correspond à la suprématie de la fonction marchande est un symptôme de décadence car le marché ne fait pas, seul, société.

Les oligarques occidentaux s’illusionnent aussi quant à leur capacité à soumettre tous les peuples à leur idéologie. En réalité l’idéologie occidentale est de plus en plus minoritaire à l’échelle du monde et elle est, à juste titre, considérée comme une agression contre leur identité par tous les autres peuples. L’échec des « révolutions arabes » débouchant non pas sur la « démocratie » mais sur l’islamisme ou la dictature le démontre une nouvelle fois.

Le monde est en train d’échapper à l’oligarchie

L’économie mondiale dérégulée selon les recettes libérales devient chaotique pour tout le monde, y compris pour l’oligarchie.

L’oligarchie, qui se parait des couleurs de la compétence, apparaît de plus en plus incapable de réguler quoi que ce soit : l’économie, le chômage, les trafics de drogue comme les flux migratoires.

Enfin, en Europe même, les conséquences désastreuses de la mondialisation pour le plus grand nombre, le Grand Remplacement et le chaos migratoire contribuent au réveil de la conscience identitaire européenne.

L’idéologie libérale/libertaire recule pour toutes ces raisons et la contestation politique des oligarques progresse partout, y compris aux Etats-Unis comme le montrent l’audience croissante de D. Trump ou de B. Sanders. Partout les peuples occidentaux commencent à se réveiller de leur léthargie et à contester les pouvoirs en place, c’est-à-dire la superclasse mondiale.

La dissidence est partout en marche

Les oligarques se prétendaient à l’avant-garde, éclairée, de l’humanité nouvelle. Mais aujourd’hui plus personne ne croit sérieusement à ce qu’ils racontent.

Le marxisme soviétique est mort du décalage entre l’idéologie et la réalité vécue par le plus grand nombre. Le Mur de l’Est est tombé pour cette raison. Il est en train de se passer la même chose en Occident.

L’oligarchie est une élite en perdition. Pour cette raison, comme toujours dans l’histoire, une nouvelle élite la remplacera bientôt.

On ne la voit pas encore car, dissidente, elle est cachée et diabolisée par le Système. Mais elle existe et se prépare. L’histoire est en marche.

Oligarques de tous les pays : préparez-vous à faire bientôt vos valises !

Michel Geoffroy (Polémia, 29 avril 2016)

La tentation totalitaire du multiculturalisme

 

Extrait d'une tribune de Mathieu Bock-Côté dans La Nef :

"[...] Il y a des limites au constructivisme. On ne saurait réduire l’humanité à sa souffrance, comme le souhaite la gauche humanitaire, non plus qu’à sa force de travail, comme le prétend la droite néolibérale, qui voudrait réduire les populations à autant de ressources humaines à déplacer selon les exigences à la fois capricieuses et fonctionnelles du capital. On ne saurait déraciner et transplanter des peuples à loisir, sans provoquer d’immenses tensions.

Le déni des cultures est un déni anthropologique grave, qui conduit, à terme, à une inintelligibilité du monde semeuse de tensions et de conflits. Le déni des cultures est un déni du réel.

L’impératif de l’ouverture à l’autre, qu’on présente comme la fondation éthique du régime diversitaire, bute sur deux questions : de combien d’autres s’agit-il et de quels autres s’agit-il ?

Il y a un certain paradoxe à voir l’idéologie multiculturaliste chanter la diversité du monde mais amalgamer tous les peuples dans la figure de l’autre, comme s’il y avait, fondamentalement, une interchangeabilité de toutes les cultures. Dès lors, dans la mesure où aucune n’est liée à un territoire, il suffirait d’un peu de pédagogie interculturelle pour qu’elles apprennent à cohabiter.

On voit à quels désastres une telle philosophie désincarnée et étrangère aux passions humaines comme à l’histoire peut conduire. L’utopisme entretient une psychologie politique particulière : lorsque l’utopie est désavouée par le réel, elle blâme ce dernier et entend durcir l’application de sa politique. Plus la société désavoue ses commandements, plus elle croit nécessaire de pousser loin l’expérimentation politique. La tentation totalitaire du multiculturalisme lui vient justement de ce constat d’un désaveu du réel.

La question de l’immigration, de ce point de vue, est une des plus importantes de notre temps, parce qu’elle rappelle à sa manière la part irréductible de chaque culture, ce qui ne veut pas dire non plus qu’elles sont imperméables entre elles.

La réalité désavoue cette fiction idéologique maquillée derrière la référence au vivre ensemble. On a beau chanter la multiplication des identités qui témoignerait d’une floraison des minorités dans une société ouverte à chacun de ses membres, on constatera surtout une désagrégation du corps politique, on doit surtout y voir un éclatement de la cité qui ne parvient plus à assumer une idée historiquement enracinée du bien commun. […]"

Boris VOLKHONSKY:
Ex: http://www.strategic-culture.org

TTIP and TPP vs Eurasian Integration

If official reports are to be believed, US President Barack Obama’s recent visit to Europe covered everything except for what was actually at the heart of the discussions, namely the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).

For Obama, whose foreign policy successes look pathetic even compared to those of his predecessor George W Bush, it is vitally important that he finishes his presidency with a bang, especially since, by his own admission, prospects for the future of the TTIP will be extremely uncertain once the White House changes hands.

And it is not even that Donald Trump, who is openly critical of the global ambitions of the current American elite, has a chance of becoming president. There will also be problems should Hillary Clinton become president, even though, like Obama, she represents the interests of transnational corporations and is a great believer in the idea of US global dominance. The election campaign currently underway in the US has already shown that the electorate is willing to place the interests of the US as a nation state above the imperial ambitions of the elite and large corporations. Trump is not the only one to have expressed this trend, there is also Bernie Sanders and even, to some extent, the number two in the Republican race, Ted Cruz. Even if she wins, therefore, Hillary Clinton will be forced to take this point of view into account, particularly as it will only gain her supporters over time.

Europe’s leaders (with the exception of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and UK Prime Minister David Cameron, perhaps) are also not full of enthusiasm at the prospect of their countries becoming colonial appendages to a US monopoly, especially as the majority of countries in Europe also have elections coming up. So if Obama actually succeeds in concluding the TTIP, he will be able to feel like a winner. Along with the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement signed between the US and 11 countries of the Asia-Pacific region in October 2015, the outgoing US president will be able to take credit for creating a hugely powerful American-centric system that engulfs the whole of Eurasia from the West and the East and subordinates a number of developed or successfully developing national economies to American (or rather multinational) capital, with a view to the strangulation or subsequent subordination of those countries left out of the TTIP and TPP – primarily China, Russia, India and a number of others.

In addition, America’s attempts to create the TPP and TTIP, which are designed to break the balance of interests in Eurasia completely, are taking place amid strengthening integration processes within Eurasia itself. The joint statement issued by Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping in May 2015, during the 70th Anniversary of WW II Victory celebrations, on the integration of the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) and the Silk Road Economic Belt opened up huge possibilities for uniting the economies of all the countries in Greater Eurasia. And the process of India and Pakistan’s accession to the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) as fully-fledged members (with the possibility of Iran also joining the SCO in the near future) that began in July of the same year simply complete these integration processes.

Moreover, the integration initiatives in Eurasia are not limited to the EEU, the Silk Road Economic Belt and the SCO. In this context, the Eurasian initiative of South Korean President Park Geun-hye, Kazakhstan’s ‘Nurly Zhol’ programme and Mongolia’s Steppe Route project are also worth mentioning. The fundamental difference between all of these projects and the TTP and TTIP projects being promoted and financed by the US is as follows. The main objective of the TPP and TTIP (besides subordinating the member countries’ economies) is to impede the economic growth of the leading Eurasian countries, primarily China and Russia, and prevent their integration into the Asia-Pacific Region and Eurasia. Thus the TPP and TTIP initiatives are exclusive, they deliberately exclude America’s main economic and political rivals. In contrast, the EEU, the Silk Road Economic Belt, the SCO and all the other projects and initiatives mentioned above are by definition inclusive. They are not only open to participation by all the countries in the region, but would simply be unrealisable if just one of the countries located in an area where major infrastructure projects were being implemented was unable, for whatever reason, to take part.

And here we see the following picture. In addition to creating certain frameworks that are under the complete domination of the US (and thereby working for the completely hopeless goal of preserving the unipolar world order), forces that have no interest in the realisation of inclusive integration processes in Eurasia are attempting to directly torpedo these initiatives. If we were to compare a map of the hot spots in Eurasia with a map of the Silk Route’s proposed routes, for example, we would see that most of the trouble spots are located along these routes (along with the routes intended for the development of other integration projects), as well as at the junctions and the most crucial points.

These include the territorial disputes (between China and its neighbours in East and Southeast Asia, for example, or between India and Pakistan), ethnic conflicts (in Myanmar, Nepal and the Pakistani province of Balochistan), civil wars (in Syria or Ukraine), and direct foreign military intervention (in Afghanistan and Iraq) that have placed these countries on the brink of collapse, piracy in the Strait of Malacca and the Horn of Africa, and much more. And it can hardly be considered a coincidence that the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh (which is undoubtedly being orchestrated by forces outside of the country) once again flared up just when the situation surrounding Iran (which, until recently, was one of the main obstacles to Eurasian integration) was beginning to more or less get back to normal. We should also mention here the enormous efforts of foreign (primarily American) NGOs in Central Asia, where a huge number of conflicts and potential conflicts are lying dormant or smouldering. And thus we get a complete picture of how, in addition to engulfing Eurasia in its own projects, the US is seeking to weaken the continent’s unity in favour of the old principle of ‘divide and rule’.

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